On 16/06/2015 8:41 PM, john whelan wrote:
Could we make an effort to map one bit of India remotely ideally one
that has a few mappers in it or users and see if it can grow from
there? Any NGOs operating in India?
If possible it should be a place where tourist go. I'd think tourist
would be interested in OSM as an out of contact thing so as not to run
up charges and they may be more familiar with OSM.
That would give some encouragement for local hotels, restaurants etc to
be on OSM. Maybe a local school could then have it as a pratical
computing class to add such on the ground data...
I think there are mappers in Bangladesh or East Bengal as it used to
be called before it split from India perhaps they might have some
ideas? Yes I am aware that India is a very large place.
Cheerio John
On 15 June 2015 at 22:01, Arun Ganesh <arun.plane...@gmail.com
<mailto:arun.plane...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Fair enough. Although a quick mapcompare session shows that GM has
nowhere near the quality that it has in Europe/America, so it
should
be less work for OSM to overtake GM in India than it took in
Europe (I
know, if the community is tiny, "less overall work" is still
way more
work for each individual).
Businesses throughout the country want to list themselves on GM to
get more customers. I have been to remote parts of the country
where hoteliers or shop owners ask me how they can be listed. This
POI database is massive and along with it comes address
information which is data gold in India for geocoding. There is
low business incentive for anyone to list themselves on OSM,
moreover the computer skills to do that is lacking by most people.
If there were more users of openstreetmap, this can change quickly.
You point out an interesting bit of information though: GM is for
English speakers. Do you render a Hindi (and other languages)
slippymap ? Provide Hindi OSMand and Garmin maps ? That might
catch
the attention of many users. In Ireland we have an all-Gaelic map
(http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/?zoom=9&layers=00BFFFFFF&lat=52.92847&lon=-7.65252)
that attracts people from outside OSM.
Its a given that most users of new technology in the country are
familiar with English, or atleast the Latin alphabet. One may not
be able to speak the language but can easily read street signs and
it is more familiar than localized signage. We have had trials
with localized maps http://yogiks.github.io/osm-kn/map/ but apart
from being good PR they have limited practical use in daily life.
We would need to support 22 languages and in offline mediums to
make the maps truly accessible to most of the people. Till then
maps will continue to be used only by a small class of the
population..
--
Arun Ganesh
(planemad) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad>
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